A NATION AT WAR: PROTESTERS

A NATION AT WAR: PROTESTERS; Decades Later, 60's Icons Still Live by Their Message

By JAMES BARRON

Published: March 30, 2003

The folk singer Pete Seeger had a quick two-part answer for the inevitable where-is-he-now question. ''I'm senile,'' he said, ''but I'm still here.''

As for the first part, he is not. And as for the second, ''still here'' covers a still-busy life.

Mr. Seeger, 83, sang at an antiwar gathering at Riverside Church last week. (''They put me on early,'' he said. ''I had to get a long way home.'') Most Saturdays, he spends a couple of hours with friends who stand on street corners in Dutchess County holding peace signs. On Friday, he picked up some driftwood that had floated in near the Clearwater, the 106-foot boat that came to symbolize the campaign to clean the Hudson River. (''Now I leave sailing to younger people.'')

Tom Hayden, 63, had a heart attack and bypass surgery last year. ''I'm seen as an experienced old hand,'' he said. But he has mastered the technology of 2003. He has a Web site (www.tomhayden.com) and uses e-mail to distribute a ''daily strategic memo'' with thoughts on how to oppose globalization and, lately, the war in Iraq.

Joan Baez, 62, is on tour. She appeared on Friday night in Keene, N.H., last night in Collingswood, N.J., and is to appear tonight in Stamford, Conn. Her manager says the title of her next album is a coincidence, not a comment on the way the world is going. The album will be called ''Dark Chords on a Big Guitar.''

Norman Siegel, 59, the former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who was taken into custody briefly during a demonstration in Washington Square Park last week (he said the charges were never processed), has noticed something different of late. ''More people are calling me 'Mr. Siegel,' '' he said, ''and I have a sense that I'm informing people about things we did four decades ago. Very often I look around the room and I'm the only one who was there. Where are the people who were with me on the left and the right? Some of them have died, and some of them chose to do other things.''

They were among the era-defining figures at antiwar demonstrations in the 1960's and 70's. As the American-led war in Iraq continues, some find themselves assuming familiar roles, criticizing the government for actions they consider illegal or immoral. Some worry about being stereotyped as protesters from the 60's when they have done many meaningful things in the decades since. Some have been slowed by health problems. Some say they have the ear of like-minded types who get attention now.

''You know this thing about Michael Moore saying the military should withdraw from the media?'' Mr. Hayden said. ''I was with Michael Moore last week, and that was the speech I gave. We consulted on it, and he incorporated the phrase because he's got a bigger voice.''

One constant in conversations with those who were in the front ranks of the antiwar protests and civil rights demonstrations in the 1960's is a certain excitement at a resurgence of street politics and protests.

''This is an exciting period, win, lose or draw,'' Mr. Seeger said. ''One of the main ways it's different is all ages are now participating in this. Thirty, thirty-five years ago, it was mainly the young people, and they didn't care if there were any older people there.''

The Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr. was chaplain of Yale University and was convicted of advising young men how to avoid the draft. ''I'm flunking retirement,'' said Mr. Coffin, now 78 and living in Strafford, Vt. ''I speak against the war quite regularly'' in churches and at the State Capitol in Montpelier. He had a stroke in 2000, but said ''the adrenaline gets pumping when we talk about the war.''

''I felt a lot of misgivings about the war in Vietnam, but those misgivings were as nothing compared with what I feel now,'' he said, adding, ''I'm very pleased with the amount of disquiet in America.''

His home is less than an hour from where Dave Dellinger, one of the defendants in the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial, is in an assisted-living center. Mr. Dellinger's partner, Elizabeth Peterson, said he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease and does not hear well. ''He's still functioning fairly well,'' she said, ''and does answer some letters.''

As the 60's went from the headlines to the history books, some turned to politics -- some more successfully than others. Mr. Hayden was elected to the State Assembly in California in 1982 and the State Senate in 1992.

Mr. Siegel, who was a frequent critic of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, ran for public advocate in 2001 and lost to Betsy Gotbaum. He is now a lawyer in private practice and the executive director of the Freedom Legal Defense and Education Project, which, he says, focuses attention on ''the proper balance between freedom and security.'' He also has plans for a book about protest movements through history.

''This war presents us with a sense of powerlessness, a lack of accountability,'' he said. ''There have been questions from people of my vintage where we thought that we had changed some of the principles and values of America, and now, 40 years later, one begins to wonder what went wrong.''

Ms. Baez performs about 70 concerts a year, her manager, Mark Spector, said. She performs new material, but often reminds audiences of her activism -- ''Just remember, 40 years ago I was right,'' she declared during a concert at Town Hall in Manhattan last year. But, Mr. Spector said, something is different these days.

''While her message is the same and is consistent with her message of 30 years ago, 40 years ago, it seems to resonate differently with different segments of the audience,'' he said. ''Some of them at age 50 or 55 don't seem to be as interested in hearing her basically antiwar views as others, and yet the majority seem comforted hearing those views expressed by someone they grew up hearing express those views.''

Photos: 'I WAS RIGHT' -- Joan Baez speaking to reporters at a California draft board in 1967, above, and singing in San Francisco at an antiwar rally in January. (Getty Images); (Associated Press); 'STILL HERE' -- Pete Seeger during a march on Washington in 1968, above, and at the Beacon Sloop Club in Beacon, N.Y., last week. (Diana Davies); (Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times); 'EXPERIENCED OLD HAND' -- Tom Hayden with Jane Fonda, then his fiancée, at a 1972 news conference, above, and last week in his Culver City, Calif., office. (Misha Erwitt for The New York Times); (Associated Press)